Special Services Ending for the Home Schooled

WHEN her son, Ricky, entered elementary school in the Katonah-Lewisboro district, Joy Drummond spent hours every evening helping him learn what his teachers had presented in the classroom. But Ricky, who has a learning disability, was not able to absorb the lessons. “I was reteaching him everything,” Ms. Drummond said.

By the time Ricky was approaching second grade, however, his mother stopped her instruction, she said, “so that we could better understand the special services he might need.” Those services were initially provided at a school. But, unsatisfied with her son’s progress, Ms. Drummond, a social worker who is the parent-family coordinator for the Putnam Independent Living Services, also made another decision: She would begin schooling Ricky at home.

Ricky, now 13, has benefited from that choice, Ms. Drummond said. After the school district recommended services that included occupational therapy and speech therapy, Ricky now receives only one special service, which provides technical support like computer programs to help with spelling.

But that, along with all other special services, has stopped under a new State Department of Education ruling restricting special services for children with disabilities who are educated at home.

“These services are critically important,” said Mary Fratianni, of Port Jefferson Station on Long Island, who is the state coordinator for Parents Instructing Challenged Children, a support group for parents home-schooling children with special needs. She is also the mother of an 11-year-old son with a rare congenital brain tumor, E. J., whom she has been home schooling.

James P. DeLorenzo, the Education Department’s statewide coordinator for special services, said in an interview that the change was made to comply with a 2004 federal law governing services to children with disabilities. The children would need to attend either a state-approved private school or a local public school to get services, pending an evaluation by the school district, he said. The change was announced in a January memo.

“The federal law essentially said that students with disabilities are entitled to special services if the state treats them as nonpublic school students,” Mr. DeLorenzo said.

The state spends about $17,675 for every child needing some type of special education, compared with about $8,000 per child in regular education settings. About 483,000 children receive some type of special education.

According to Education Department officials, E. J. Fratianni’s school district in Mount Sinai on Long Island spends about $18,500 per child with special needs. That is about 300 children, or 12 percent of the K-to-12 population, the state said.

The Education Department has not done a cost analysis of increased spending that may be needed to absorb additional students. Even if all of those children were to be transferred to a public school setting, “the cost would be negligible,” said Tom Dunn, a department spokesman.

Mr. DeLorenzo said budget considerations had “absolutely nothing to do with this.” Instead, he said, a case review of an upstate child who was receiving special education drew attention to the federal law’s strict guidelines.

The executive director of the Westchester-Putnam School Board Association, Janet S. Walker, said that she had reviewed the change in policy and that it was “important that school districts follow the law.”

Ms. Drummond said she took Ricky out of his elementary school because “we saw our son crumbling under the strain of a classroom setting.”

“So we just said the heck with the system — this is our child, and we know our child, and we can combine those services that he needs with a home-school environment,” she said. She has spent “six intense hours a day” home schooling Ricky, she said.

Now the state is urging school districts to offer students the opportunity to enroll in their local public schools, where services would be continued.

THOMAS J. SCHMIDT, a staff lawyer for the Home School Legal Defense Association, disagrees with the state’s approach and said the federal law cited by state officials was open to interpretation. “I would argue that the state is not required to provide special services, but may do so at their discretion, as they have been doing long before and even after the 2004 federal law,” he said.

In addition, Mr. Schmidt said, federal funds make up less than 20 percent of the money that the state spends on special services. “They have the option of continuing these services even without federal funds,” he said.

For some parents, the changes will mean enrolling children in public schools or perhaps seeking services at private schools in order to sustain special services.

Several years ago, Andrew Hofer of Ossining, head of a 140-member home-schooling group in Westchester, chose to transfer his son Dustin, then in fourth grade, to the public school system after learning of a special services program that would provide reading augmentation. “That was his first experience with a classroom setting,” Mr. Hofer said of Dustin, now 15, who had a learning disability.

Though Mr. Hofer still supports the idea of home schooling — “It allows kids to exploit their best strength,” he said — he also said he believed that schools had improved in recognizing and catering to the abilities of children with special needs.

But for parents like Eileen Benthal of Jamesport on Long Island, public school is not an option. Her 11-year-old daughter Johanna was born with multiple cavernous angiomas, or tumors of blood vessels in the brain, necessitating 70 operations to date in an effort to stay ahead of lesions that would be fatal if left unattended.

Transportation to and from a school would jeopardize her daughter’s fragile medical status, Ms. Benthal said. The school district accommodated her request to let Johanna remain at home.

Adding to parents’ frustration is the uneven interpretation of when schools must end services.

Ms. Fratianni said the Mount Sinai district has allowed E. J. to continue through the end of this school year because money had been set aside in the budget.

Other parents have had considerably less time to prepare. Ms. Drummond said Ricky’s services had already ended. Ruth Romero-Nivel, in Beacon, was given a few days’ notice that services provided to her 11-year-old son, Alexander, who is autistic, would be terminated.

Bridgit M. Burke, a professor at Albany Law School, is a member of a task force organized in response to the Education Department memo and is working to amend legislation on special education services. She said, “They ripped these services away, and there are families all over this state that have just lost these services and are trying to make do — oftentimes in situations that are critical.”

Ms. Fratianni said the Mount Sinai district had provided numerous services, including physical therapy and speech therapy, for E. J., who suffered seizures about every 10 minutes in the first years of his life as a result of his brain tumor, known as hypothalamic hamartoma. The Mount Sinai district has sent experts to work with him every week since he was kindergarten age, paid for by a budget set aside for the Individualized Education Program, his mother said.

Ms. Fratianni says she is convinced that the combination of home care and outside help has allowed E. J. to progress well beyond doctors’ predictions.

Gathering her belongings after an hour or so of bowling at Coram Country Lanes that fulfilled E. J.’s gym requirement under state regulations, Ms. Fratianni recalled the many setbacks resulting from her son’s health. But signs of progress are clear, like E. J.’s ability to calculate the correct change for a pretzel and to interrupt his mother’s musings to repeat his highest bowling score of the day, a 69.